


Time Considered As A Semi-Precious Stone Sunk In Dark Water

by Thimblerig



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Awkward Flirting, F/F, Flirting, Period-Typical Medical Practices, Prescience is a bitch, brief reference to character death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-16
Updated: 2019-11-16
Packaged: 2021-01-24 16:36:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,069
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21341341
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Thimblerig/pseuds/Thimblerig
Summary: The stone says nothing. It is just a stone: dirty and imperfect, rough, fractured, hard, fragile. There is a light in it still, like fire.It is just a stone.Agnes can have it, if she wants, and everything that comes with it...
Relationships: Agnes Nutter/Original Female Character
Comments: 10
Kudos: 19
Collections: Femslash Exchange 2019





	Time Considered As A Semi-Precious Stone Sunk In Dark Water

**Author's Note:**

  * For [yrfrndfrnkly](https://archiveofourown.org/users/yrfrndfrnkly/gifts).

Agnes is collecting leeches, when it happens.

She’s in the puddles and the mud with her tawny hair loose and wild, skirts kilted high to stay out of the wet and her legs sunk knee-deep in the dark water. There’s an apothecary in town pays good money for the squirmy little things and she’ll keep some back to tend her Granny’s gout. It’s a decent day out, mud or no. She wades a little further among the long-tasselled reeds and her plumply pretty friend Constant-in-Affliction straightens her back from stirring the water, and modestly tucks a strand of night-black hair under the starched linen of her cap. Always shy, is Constant, always armouring herself in neatness - she is a very proper sort of girl, not prone to getting muddy at all, and Agnes wonders again why she came out here. 

“How many dost thou need?” asks Constant. “For the witchery?”

Agnes wrinkles her nose. “'Tisn’t witchery, this. It’s just medicine.”

Constant looks at her straight. The afternoon light strikes her pale brown eyes so that they look almost amber, framed by faint eyebrows, a tip-tilted nose, round cheeks. A sweet mouth that Agnes has watc- “Art not a witch, then?”

“Didst not say that,” Agnes answers, grinning.

It’s a risky thing to say, in this time, in this place. Most of what Agnes does is herbcraft: the virtues of the plants and the planets which rule them - what any competent woman with a stillroom could make - and she’s learned a smattering of flim-flam and verbal tricks from wandering mountebanks. There’s a little power in what she does but - witchcraft is hard to define, for someone who truly studies witchcraft. It is… rather easier to define for someone who is angry at a bad harvest, or at a woman who talks back too much, or if that someone is afraid. It is risky to be called a witch, to admit to it, but Agnes would damn them all to the devil’s hob before covering her hair in starched linen and practicing meekness.

“Show me some magic?”

“Maybe I already have,” Agnes smiles.

“When?”

Agnes swishes to the edge of the pond and steps out to sit with her skirts rucked up and cups one hand to catch a sleepy well-fed leech dropping off her calf. “Last week.”

Constant rolls her eyes. “That coin was never in my ear. It was in thine fingers.”

“It was -”

Constant pokes her pink tongue out, impudent as a child and wades to the side of the pond to perch beside Agnes. She has a pebble in her hand, smeared with the mud in which it lay at the bottom of the water, but she lifts it and the hot and lowering sun shoots brands at it, eye-piercing, and calls out the warm topaz colours at the heart.The witch sighs, her loose and tangled tresses hissing as they move over her shoulders. “Shalt show thee some real magic, then.”

“When?”

“Thou’lt know.”

Constant smiles then, like a cat, with the expression mostly in the eyes. “For thee,” she says, “in thanks: a token.” Her fingers brush Agnes’ palm as she moves to drop the mud-smeared stone into it, and prickles shiver along Agnes’ arm. She snatches her hand away.

Constant bites her lip, her fine eyebrows crinkling. “Dost not want it? It’s so pretty.”

“Thy eyes are prettier.”

Constant stops breathing.

And Time shoots Agnes, heart-piercing, and she _knows._ She knows the feel and weight of the sighing groan Constant will make the first time Agnes settles between her legs, on a steamy-warm afternoon two years from now, after they’ve slipped away from gleaning the fields and tucked themselves between the roots of an ancient linden tree, legs aching and hands scraped from the tiny grains - and the sweat of her, fragrant in the heat, the topaz-amber of her eyes, the strands of dark-water hair fallen forgotten from out of her starched linen cap and flowing wanton, free, the lush swell of her calves and her shivers as Agnes runs one curving hand up, she - 

She knows their argument when Constant-in-Affliction marries - and Tobias Device won’t be a bad boy, no, but he will take Constant away and Agnes knows how much she will _hate_ him, tending her resentment like sullen coals in a banked fire, smothering it only for the few scraps of light and life when Constant _smiles_ at her -

She knows the last groaning sigh Constant will ever make, at the birth of her third child, settled awkwardly on a birthing stool in a dark room with Agnes crouched bitterly between her knees to catch the tiny infant and Agnes will never know _everything,_ will never know _enough,_ not for what matters - 

How terrible to love what death can touch.

Dimly, she knows that there will be burning, and she puts that away for now because there is a girl sitting beside her, waiting in the breathless hush of a summer afternoon, waiting for _something…_

The stone says nothing. It is just a stone: dirty and imperfect, rough, fractured, hard, fragile. There is a light in it still, like fire.

It is just a stone.

Agnes can have it, if she wants, and everything that comes with it.

She turns her hand over, making a cup, and feels the cool weight of it in her palm, the feather-light brush of Constant’s fingers. Her eyelids droop, drowsy, and when she opens them her friend is staring at her, almost nose to nose. Constant’s starched cap is still set very neatly over her coiled hair; this close the faint freckles that her mother has tried to bleach away show faintly on the bridge of her small nose. Cool topaz eyes drop to Agnes’s mouth, considering. Agnes’s hand clenches hard around the stone.

“Dost thou want it?” the girl asks, and Agnes hears everything she isn’t saying. She is a witch, after all.

“I -”

Constant threads her fingers very lightly through the tangled swags of Agnes’s own tawny hair, gentle so that she doesn’t tug where tugging is not wanted. It is not at all proper, like this, and Agnes is starting to wonder if Constant-in-Affliction was ever proper at all, when it comes down to it. 

How gracious the world is, to still be surprising.

“Wilt thou?” Constant asks again, close enough that her sweet breath is on Agnes’s lips.

Agnes kisses her.

**Author's Note:**

> // The title is mildly inspired by another story title “Time Considered As A Helix of Semi-Precious Stones,” because it’s a pretty sort of a title.
> 
> // _the virtues of the plants and the planets which rule them_ \- from Nicholas Culpepper's Herbal:
> 
> _Instructions for the right use of the book._  
And herein let me premise a word or two. The Herbs, Plants, &c. are now in the book appropriated to their proper planets. Therefore,
> 
> _First, Consider what planet causeth the disease; that thou mayest find it in my aforesaid Judgment of Diseases._
> 
> _Secondly, Consider what part of the body is afflicted by the disease, and whether it lies in the flesh, or blood, or bones, or ventricles._
> 
> _Thirdly, Consider by what planet the afflicted part of the body is governed: that my Judgment of Diseases will inform you also._
> 
> _Fourthly, You may oppose diseases by Herbs of the planet, opposite to the planet that causes them: as diseases of Jupiter by herbs of Mercury, and the contrary; diseases of the Luminaries by the herbs of Saturn, and the contrary; diseases of Mars by herbs of Venus, and the contrary._
> 
> _Fifthly, There is a way to cure diseases sometimes by Sympathy, and so every planet cures his own disease; as the Sun and Moon by their Herbs cure the Eyes, Saturn the Spleen, Jupiter the liver, Mars the Gall and diseases of choler, and Venus diseases in the instruments of Generation._
> 
> Medicine was _different,_ back then.
> 
> // _“That coin was never in my ear. It was in your fingers.”_ \- I’m weak for the classics.
> 
> // _How terrible to love what death can touch._ \- as far as I can tell, this was written by Judah Halevi, a Jewish physician/poet/philosopher of Spain: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judah_Halevi
> 
> // Some of the history of leech-collecting: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leech_collector (There’s a fairly graphic picture there, so mind out.)

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[PODFIC] Time Considered As A Semi-Precious Stone Sunk In Dark Water](https://archiveofourown.org/works/22442476) by [Thimblerig](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Thimblerig/pseuds/Thimblerig)


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